The volume offers twelve essays on widely varying topics relating to modern American Catholic laywomen. It is a solid collection which illuminates some familiar venues for research (Marian devotions; women authors and activists; the Grail) and some less expected ones (Dolores Huerta and Hispanic labor activism; correspondence of a black jazz composer and performer; cross-generational natural family planning advocates; the daughter of Lakota holy man Black Elk; women bookstore owners in Chicago).

The editors’ Introduction notes that recovery efforts are needed for histories of laywomen, who have contributed much to the Church and to Catholic society, and yet who remain underacknowledged and understudied. Also relevant to this academic quest is the difficulty in locating primary sources, and yet the contributors have made significant progress with the materials that they did unearth and in their ethnographies. As the editors note, women’s connections to the faith were not without tension, and therefore the sources “also reveal different expressions of their deep love and conflict in their engagement with the Catholic tradition, as they creatively struggled with the limitations imposed on them as laywomen in the church” (3). The volume’s essays were completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant challenge to the researchers themselves, who deserve praise for their efforts.

Traversing chapters arranged alphabetically by author’s name, Vaughan Booker opens the collection with a study of thirty-two letters to and from jazz artist and Catholic convert, Mary Lou Williams. He found that Williams managed to transcend white male authority and racist challenges through her sometimes irreverent communications with friends.

It is a well-known story that although Catholic couples largely ignored the 1968 papal directive against artificial birth control, some loyal couples took up “natural family planning,” a method of tracking women’s fertility cycles using basal temperature readings and mucus patterns. Katherine Dugan follows three generations of National Family Planning users to show how Gen X women embodied progressive notions of women’s health and identified with “green” politics, yet would not be readily accepted by second-wave feminists. The choice by Millennial and Gen Z women to engage with the rhythm method seems more aligned with improving its aesthetics and less concerned with Catholic teaching than with a current secular suspicion of contraception. Still, across the past fifty years, Catholic women could not be regarded as feminists.

Brian Clites traces the history of the all-female staffed St. Benet’s bookstore in Chicago, which operated for almost 50 years until 1973. Stocked with books in theology and Catholic periodicals, the site became a hub for Catholic intellectuals, liturgical reformers, and Catholic Workers. The venue was further transformed by its second owner in 1947, who eventually joined the Catholic Worker. In Chicago, she hoped for the bookstore to unite working-class and middle-class Catholics through shared commitment to theological work on the CW model. Its success came through the shrewd addition of artisan crafts and mass-produced Catholic objects for sale. Clites labels the bookstore a third space which gave women a degree of autonomy as entrepreneurs and women of faith not under hierarchical control.

Catherine Osbourne targets Catholic women as patrons of sacred art. She offers a case study of three affluent women who served as patrons of endeavors located in the three western states of Arizona, California, and Texas. In exploring the inevitable clashes with clergy over ultimate control of liturgical projects in parish or campus settings, she suggests that gender was less of a defining factor than lay status. Clergy were unwilling to surrender control of sacred spaces to laity, forcing women to either “to persuade, or to withdraw” (200).

Marian Ronan places the Grail movement for women in an international context. Founded in 1928 by two Dutch women and established in the United States in 1940, the Grail was a quasi-monastic group whose rules encouraged women to lives of chastity and service without taking actual vows. Despite the movement’s professed dedication to aid the hierarchy in fighting secular modernity, the clergy were challenged to figure out how to “manage” unvowed laywomen. Ronan finds that three larger trends in the Church – an intellectual revival, the liturgical movement, and Catholic social action – “converged remarkably” in the Grail (235) and enhanced its appeal. As it spread to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Grail offered women numerous ways to perform Catholic Action. Despite dwindling numbers in the present day, the Grail women have made their mark on various fields from farming to hospitals to elected office.

The lay apostolate is also addressed by Sandra Yocum who concludes the volume with an examination of the surprisingly vague and disputed notion of the Mystical Body of Christ, a papal initiative which undergirded all Catholic organizations from the pope’s initial calls for Catholic Action in the 1930s up to Vatican II. It harbored certain ambiguities: were the laity allowed to do anything not under the watchful eyes of the clergy? Where did laywomen fit into this apostolate? A papal statement from 1905 implied a more expansive definition of what constituted lay action, as work that was broadly dedicated to restoring a Christian society, while the later 1943 encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ left undefined the category of “pious associations” in which the laity assisted the hierarchy and clergy. Women, it seems, found ways to interpret how to live out the Mystical Body, in ministries to counter racism, sexism, and the limits of theology as represented by male professionals.

Space does not permit a summary of all the essays, but those not mentioned are equally engaging and well-researched. Overall, the volume’s strength lies in highlighting new research on laywomen across a variety of ethnicities and places. Its weakness lies in the theory-light portrayal of gender and gender conflicts within Catholicism and the absence of connections to other religious traditions, such as Judaism and Protestantism, where American women surely experienced similar limitations from male overseers and social norms.

The collection would provoke discussion in undergraduate and graduate courses and is informative even for those women who lived through these events and participated in these movements. Perhaps a Volume II will follow?